We Used to be Friends: Ashcan Edition

We Used To Be Friends is a collaborative teenage detective drama game. As a group, you’ll create your teenagers, the city they live in, and a season-long mystery that ties them all together.

We Used To Be Friends involves a series of interwoven mysteries. You’ll have your season mystery, every character has their own personal mystery, and each session has its own episode mystery. Since the game is collaborative, you’ll investigate locations to find clues and then apply those clues to the various mysteries, moving them along as you discover what happens together. No one needs to plan it out before you play. You can pick up the game and immediately begin to figure out who did it.

While the mysteries are going on, the characters still live their lives. They have friends, enemies, acquaintances who are all around them. They open up to each other, they fight over their feelings, and get into trouble while figuring out what happened. Part of the essential conflict and drama of We Used to be Friends is balancing the tension of the mysteries with the reality that these characters all have to live in the same town.

I just wanted to say that the game looks fantastic! I understand that this is an ashcan, but after a quick read-through, I was wondering about a few things:

pg. 7 - Under "Build your City", you refer to a sheet to keep track of the city information generated, and I assume, changed during play, but the sheet is not included.

pg. 17 - Under "To Solve a Mystery", you mention that a number of clues must be placed on a suspect to trigger the end of the episode and solve the mystery, but that number does not appear to be in the text. You also mention getting rewards for solving the crime and a set of questions to answer (which I believe can possibly alter the city sheet?), but these also do not appear to be in the text.

pg. 44 - Under "The Tech Geek", the tech geek's Traits seem to be off. All the other profiles' traits add up to a net +3, but the top line of the Tech Geek's traits add up to +2 and the bottom line to +1....See more />

I'm really looking forward to playtesting this game, and I've got some friends who are excited as well, but I feel we really need the mystery mechanics to properly playtest it and get you good feedback! Thanks for creating such an interesting game, though! As you can probably tell, I'm eager to try it out!

May 18, 2018 1:03 pm UTC

Hello Jonathan!

Thank you for posting these questions. I'll give you some short answers now and expand on them in the next few weeks on the blog over at http://growlingdoorgames.com/

1. Pg 7. Yes, that must have gotten missed. Originally there was a plan to have a separate sheet that was like a character sheet for the city. We'll get them up on the site.

2. Pg 17.

Episode Mysteries = Number of clues on a suspect equal to number of players (so if you're playing with 5 people, there needs to be 5 clues on one suspect)

Personal Mysteries = Number of clues on a suspect is number of players -1 (so if you have same 5 people, you need 4 on one suspect to solve a personal mystery)

3. pg 44 - The Tech Geek has the most "stuff." Like everyone else gets involved a lot, the tech geek kind of gets to be the "I HAVE JUST THE THING" so we found that when they stats were higher they were just dominating games so to counter that...See more we switched up the stat lines a little bit.

Like I said, I'll be posting answers over at the Growling Door Games blog so you should check that out to get more fleshed out answers, and some sheets and the like that will help!

Jonathan DMay 18, 2018 1:44 pm UTC

PURCHASER

Got it! Thanks for the info, and I'll check out the blog. I can't wait to try the game out!

Gordon CMay 16, 2018 11:26 am UTC

Kudos! The premise is exactly what I imagined when I read the title. I will pick this up in the near future.

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